By now everyone should recognize that television has failed Generations X and Z. That’s the realization in Jane Schoenbrun’s new film I Saw the TV Glow. Yet Schoenbrun isn’t sure whether to blame TV or its victims. Automatically rejecting religion and traditional moral training, she suspiciously looks at TV, adores its influence as the “third parent” (George W. S. Trow’s notion that television’s impact on children equaled that of a father and mother), and then indulges the generational disaster in its wake.
The protagonists of I Saw the TV Glow are adolescents Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who follow a cult sci-fi TV series, The Pink Opaque, as a way to dissociate from their daily lives as lonely teenage outsiders. Schoenbrun compiles heaps of psychodrama and cultural fright. The TV show is titled after a best-of album by ’80s British art-rockers the Cocteau Twins, but the show itself evokes the ’90s paranormal series The X Files, plus some grotesque prophesy of Stranger Things. Schoenbrun’s time-hopping tale (following Owen and Maddy to grim adulthood) synthesizes the two major modes of pop-cultural expression: The Cocteau Twins’ ethereal, ambient musical escapism contrasts with television’s blatant shock effects and experimental digital-video chaos. Combining mawkishness and horror, she’s made a transgender hybrid movie.
Though a mixed-up stylist, Schoenbrun doggedly pursues her obsessions. Perhaps nothing that happens in I Saw the TV Glow is real except Owen and Maddy’s shared trauma — a combined personality in place of a single identity. Schoenbrun dramatizes the gender questions that mainstream media have legitimized as political issues: The solitude of mixed-race, sexually undeclared Owen is reflected in the slightly older lesbian Maddy. Sub-cult bonding distracts them from their harrowing family lives (a dying parent, vicious stepparents); television and its nightmares are all they believe in.
Using personal identification with media fandom as a metaphor for psychological trauma, Schoenbrun captures cultural breakdown, introducing the new trans cinema movement that is not quite sure of itself. And that confusion suffuses I Saw the TV Glow. Still, Owen/Maddy’s dilemma cries out for satire, especially given Smith’s woebegone bearing and Lundy-Paine’s relentless grievance — monotonous from adolescence to death-entranced adulthood. Instead, Schoenbrun’s frequent lapses of outré immiseration emphasize monstrous figures from The Pink Opaque that haunt Owen/Maddy’s consciousness. The show-inside-the-film’s TV simulation includes an uncanny impersonation of Dawson Creek’s Michelle Williams. Humorless dystopic references evoke Videodrome, Donnie Darko, and Poltergeist.
Whether or not the clearly progressive Schoenbrun intends it, I Saw the TV Glow warns against the cultural reality of passive media obedience that has replaced active, scrutinizing media consumption — the ultimate tragedy of Gen X and Gen Z superfans. Sci-fi and horror movies once cautioned against this intellectual degradation; now, it is the norm.
Not even the guys on the Fish Jelly podcast — the film’s target audience — endorsed I Saw the TV Glow, rejecting it as “visiting someone else’s trauma.” Schoenbrun doesn’t bring the cultural enlightenment necessary to awaken viewers to Big Tech censorship and indoctrination. So she keeps referring back to earlier cultural foundations, such as the Cocteau Twins, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (which didn’t fail the young, naïve media market that politicians and social activists now exploit).
Most horror films exaggerate fears that we repress. Schoenbrun takes on today’s lack of repression while pitying sexual and moral license. If you can’t understand what’s behind university students’ support of Hamas terrorism and their opposition to Jewish-Israeli self-defense, you’re probably ignorant that this moral idiocy has resulted from corporate media indoctrination — and Marxist academic indoctrination, too. Unpleasant as I Saw the TV Glow is, this could be the ultimate DIE — Diversity Inclusion Equity — movie.